POTTS' CAT.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume 4, Issue 327, 5 September 1879, Page 3

POTTS' CAT.

They had a big excitement over at Potts' the other day about their cat. They heard the' cat howling and screeching somewhere around the house for two.or three days, but they could'nt find her. Potts used to get up at night, fairly mad • dened with the noise, and heave things out of the back window at random, hoping to hit her and discourage her. But she never seemed to mind them ; and although eventually he fired off pretty nearly every movable thing in the house except the piano, she continued to shriek and scream in a manner that was simply appalling. At last, one day, Potts made a critical examination of the premises, and, guided by the noise, he finally located the cat in the waterspout which descends the north wall of the house. He thinks the cat must have been skylarking on the roof some dark night and accidently tumbled into the spout. Potts tried to-shake her down by hammering on the spout with, a .stick ; but the more he pounded, the louder she yelled, and the two noises roused the entire neighborhood, and attracted the attention of the police. Then he procured a clothes prop; and ascending to the roof, he endeavored to push the animal out. . But the stick was not long enough to reach her. All it was good for was to make her howl more loudly ; and it did that. At last Potts concluded to take the spout down and coax the cat out. When he got it on the ground he peeped in at the end, and he could see the animal's eyes shining like balls of fire far back in the darkness of the hole. After shaking her up for a while without inducing her to move, he made up hie mind that she must be jammed in the pipe and unable to budge. He wanted to cut the pipe open, but Butterwick said it would be a pity to spoil such a good spout for a mere eat. So Potts finally determined to blow her out with powder. He procured a small charge, and pushing it pretty well in with a stick, he " tamped " the end of the spout with clay and lighted the slow-match. Two .minutes later there was an explosion, and the tamping-clay flew out and struck Butterwick with some violence in the ribs, curling him all up on the grass by the pump. When he recovered his breath, he got up and said, . " Hang your infernal cat! It's an outrage for you to be endangering the lives of people with your diabolical schemes for getting at a beast that ought to've been killed long ago." Then Butterwick sullenly, got over the fence and went home, and the cat meanwhile kept up a howling that made everybody's hair stand on end. Potts said that he made a mistake in not placing" the butt of the spout against something solid. And so, after putting in a couple of pounds of powder, he turned the spout up and rested the end upon the ground, propping it against the pump. Then he lighted the slow-match, and the crowd scattered. There was a loud explosion, a general distribution of fragments of tin around the yard, and then out from the upper end of the spout there sailed forth something black. It ascended ; it went higher and higher and higher, until it was a mere speck ; then it came sailing down, down, down, until it struck the earth. It was the cat, singed off, bujned to a crisp, looking as if it had been spending the summer in Vesuvius, but apparently still active and hearty ; for as soon as it alighted it set up a wild, unearthly screech and darted for the woodshed, where it continued to howl until Potts went in and killed it with his shotgun. It cost him forty dollars for a new spout, but he says he doesn't grudge the money now that he has stopped that fiendish noisn. Max Adeler.